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‘It must have been. Well, you can take this bathroom while I…’
Belatedly she realised how she sounded, the gracious lady-of-the-manor act she was putting on with a welcome guest. But he was no guest in his own home and whether he was actually welcome was something he had yet to finally prove one way or another. That burned in his gut so viciously that he knew it must show in his eyes, in the uncontrolled glare he turned on her suddenly smiling face.
It had her stumbling over her words, coming to an abrupt halt and snatching in a raw, ragged breath before she made herself go on in a very different tone altogether.
‘I’m sorry—I mean—I’ll use one of the other bathrooms. Of course.’
‘Of course,’ Zarek echoed dryly.
In the past they had shared many showers in the big luxurious wetroom that formed the en suite bathroom to the master suite in the villa. Long, indulgent showers that had often ended up with them back in bed at least once before they ever decided it was time to dry off and get dressed again. Now she looked as if she couldn’t wait to get out of the room and…
Or did she? OK, she looked edgy as hell, already moving a careful step and then another towards the door. But there was a darkness in her eyes that didn’t fit with the image of careful retreat. It was the sort of darkness that he suspected was still in his eyes too, making his pupils huge, swallowing up all the colour of his irises. It was the darkness of awareness, of arousal. And just to see it made his throat ache with the effort of holding back everything he wanted to say.
The way her arms were folded tight under the soft swell of her breasts, pushing them up and forward, sent his blood pulsing hot and heavy through his head. And her hands curved to cup their softness in a way that made the bite of sensual jealousy a torment he could barely keep under control. He wanted to stride forward, to tug her arms away from their defensive position, hold them prisoner high above her head, keep them there while he plundered her mouth with his, tasting her sweetness, taking her lips’ hungry response into his own.
The blue robe might be fastened tight around her slender frame in a way that spoke of determined defence, of protection from his touch, from his kisses, but it was no defence against his eyes or his thoughts. He could still see the outline of the rucked up dress, the pleats of cotton at her hips and waist. But below that the soft silk clung lovingly to the fine curves of her thighs, the shadowed place between them, reminding him, sharp as a cruel knife, of how close he had been to being able to bury himself in her and find the heaven of release he sought. The release of oblivion in ecstasy.
It was a cruel irony that he had only just come to remember his life and there was so much of it that he wished he had never recalled. An even crueller stab of fate was the fact that Penny had been the first memory to return. Thoughts of her had been there in flashes, haunting his dreams, just out of reach, even before he had known who she was. It had been the need to find her that had driven him to try harder and harder to remember.
And then, when he had recalled just who she was, he had felt that burn of disillusionment all over again.
‘If you need a change of clothes…’ Penny’s voice broke into his thoughts.
‘It’s all right…’
This was something he had already decided he would have to concede on. He had been away for two years. The reports had had him dead. Anyone—everyone—would have thought that it was a crazy thing to do to hang onto his clothes for that long. After his mother had died, even his own father had had to acknowledge that, adore her as he had, he couldn’t keep his first wife’s wardrobe when she had been gone six months.
‘I understand if there’s nothing here.’
‘No—’
She had crossed to the wardrobe that had always been his, was fumbling with the handle. Pulling it open, she stood back so that he could see. The sight of every item of his clothing still hanging neat and straight just as he had left them over two years before had an effect like a punch to his guts, driving all the breath from his body.
‘You kept them…’
But that had her lowering her face as if in embarrassment, brushing off his comment with an awkward little flick of her head.
‘You know where the towels are…’
She almost ran from the room, leaving him staring after her, his mind see-sawing sickeningly as he tried to adjust to what had just happened.
She had kept all his clothes. In spite of the fact that she had been told he was dead, she had kept all his clothes as carefully and as well cared for as she had done when he was there. She hadn’t cleared them out or packed them away, but had kept them here, in their bedroom. The room in which she still slept.
So what did that mean?
But he had seen her with Jason that first night. Seen the way she had run into his stepbrother’s arms. And heard her…
‘I want to get away from here, start living again. I’m tired of treading water…I can’t inherit unless we have Zarek’s death declared and legalised. So let’s do that. Let’s put it all behind us…’
And then, just as he reached the door this morning, that final, dismissive toast she had made, obviously with Jason in mind.
‘The king is dead. Long live the king.’
So how did that square with the same woman who had kept every item of clothing he possessed for the time he had been gone? Did this mean that Penny had actually been hoping that he would come back?
In which case, why the hell had she bolted from his bed as if his touch appalled her?
Shaking his head, Zarek headed for the bathroom, discarding his clothes as he went.
He had taken his time about coming back, had sent a private investigator to check out the situation here on Ithaca first, before he had even made the journey from Malta and then moved onto the island incognito because he had wanted to watch and see for himself. Because, face it, the return of his memory had brought with it bad memories as well as good. Memories of feelings that the intervening two years could only have added to, made worse, dug in deeper.
And the woman he had come back to—the wife he had found waiting for him—was not at all what he had expected. For a start, he had never expected her to be here at all.
Turning on the shower full force, Zarek stepped under the rush of water and let it beat down on his head.
In fact there was just one way in which she was just the same as when he had left. And that was that she was the sexiest woman he had ever seen. The woman who only had to walk into a room to crank the heat up by one hundred degrees. Whose smile was an enticement to seduction. The woman who could make him burn with heat and hunger with one look, one word in her beautiful voice falling from her sexy soft lips.
She was a temptation strong enough to distract him from the way he really needed to be thinking, the things he had wanted to find out before he took up his old way of life again. His marriage was going to be so very different this time, or it was not going to exist at all.
But even as he told himself that the all-too-familiar heavy tightening in his groin warned him of what just thinking about Penny could do to him. The sort of reaction that stopped him thinking, drove the blood away from his brain and down to other, much more basic parts of his body. He’d already almost been caught that way once tonight. And thinking, not responding, was what he needed to do.
With a heavy sigh he reached up and turned the control on the shower to cold and forced himself to stand under it for far, far longer than he needed to get clean.
Chapter Nine
‘THAT was wonderful, thank you.’
Zarek pushed his plate away from him, reached for his wine glass, and leaned back in his chair to sip at the goldentoned liquid with a sigh of contentment.
‘It’s so long since I tasted baked feta with peppers that I had almost forgotten how much I enjoyed it. And baklava…I didn’t know that you knew how to make it.’
‘Marta taught me,’ Penny said, referring to the cook who usually ran the villa’s kitchen with a rule of iron. ‘I’ve been having cooking lessons with her—for something to do.’
She didn’t add that she had specially learned how to make the simple dish and others like it because her instructor had told her that they were Zarek’s favourites. She’d already given far too much away by revealing that she had kept all his clothes in the wardrobes since the time of his disappearance.
‘So that’s how you spent your time.’
‘Part of it anyway.’
Once again Penny couldn’t look at him but fixed her eyes on the dark line of the horizon. Even after ten o’clock at night it was still warm enough to sit out on the terrace beside the swimming pool and that was where she had served the quick and simple meal she had put together for them after she had emerged from the shower.
She hadn’t stayed under the water for long. Once safely in the sanctuary of a bathroom belonging to another bedroom, at the far end of the landing from the master suite she and Zarek had once shared, she had been quick to strip off the blue silk robe, tossing it onto the bed and then freezing in horror at the sight that confronted her in another full-length mirror.
‘Oh, my…No!’
Had she really looked such a shocking mess? With her dress dragged down and pushed up, actually torn in one place, she looked more like the victim of an assault than a passionate lover happy to give herself to the man she adored. Her underwear had disappeared, lost who knew where, and her hair was a complete bird’s nest falling in wild and knotted disarray around a shock-pale face. Even the untypical light traces of make-up that the thought of today’s dreadful board meeting had driven her to put on were smudged and smeared around her eyes, the soft tinted lipstick totally kissed off.
‘No!’
Penny put her hands to her face, covering her eyes to block out the sight, then almost immediately snatched them away again. She couldn’t bear to stay like this a moment longer. A long, hot shower would make her feel better, restore some sense of balance, repair her damaged self-esteem.
At least that was what she hoped for. What actually happened was that as she removed and discarded what little was left of her clothing all she could think of was the way that it had felt to have Zarek’s urgent hands on her dress, snatching aside the straps, dragging her skirt up high to expose her legs…She could almost still feel his touch everywhere on her skin, on her face, her breasts…her thighs. Somehow those hungry fingers had seared a path over her flesh, one that would not vanish even when she was many metres away from him, separated from his presence by the thickness of several walls.
Even diving under the shower and turning it on full force hadn’t helped. The heat of the water had followed the path of the heated touch, trickling between her breasts, sliding down to the dark curls between her legs, along her thighs…Making her freeze under the rush of the water as she felt it pound down on her head, seeming to thump out the syllables of Zarek’s name against her skull. Over and over again without a pause.
Za—rek. Za—rek…Until she could bear it no longer but lurched out of the shower, water stinging her eyes. She had no way of knowing if it was the flow from the shower or the tears that threatened, only that she was half blinded by it, groping roughly for her towel before snatching from the rail at it and rubbing her face hard.
How was it possible that she had gone into the shower to feel clean, to wash away the scent of Zarek’s body on hers, the feel of his touch, and yet now she felt worse than before, tainted, marked for ever? It was as if his caresses had been a brand, his kisses scarring her for life. She would never be free of the darkly sensual hold he had over her, the fetters of sexuality that had bound her to him from the very first.
And was that all that it was? she couldn’t help wondering now. She had fallen head over heels for Zarek when she had first met him, and she had truly believed herself in love at first sight. But had it been anything more than a hugely powerful crush, the first stirrings of her female sexuality? She hadn’t known what sexual desire really meant and so she had only thought of the way she had felt for Zarek in terms of love and giving her heart.
But her time married to this man had taught her that he, at least, was capable of claiming her as his in purely sexual terms. Of wanting her only for the wild and white hot passion that flared between them every time they touched. Every time they kissed. He had wooed her, won her, seduced her, married her, made her his, without a single trace of love for her. He had wanted her in his bed, to warm and satisfy his body and to create an heir for the company that was really the only thing that touched his heart, or what part of a heart he actually possessed.
‘I married you for a child!’ The last angry words he had flung at her before leaving for the Troy came back to haunt her once more. ‘If you want this marriage to continue then that is non-negotiable.’
A sensation like the trickle of something slow and icy slipped down her spine at the thought. And that sense of creeping cold was made all the worse by staring out at the moonlit sea and remembering all those other nights she had sat out here on the terrace, doing exactly that. Then she had had to fight so hard against the nightmarish thoughts of Zarek’s lifeless body tossed overboard from the pirates’ boat and left abandoned in the water. Just the memory she had of those thoughts made Penny shiver convulsively in spite of the warmth.
‘Cold?’ Zarek shocked her by the speed and focus with which he reacted, turning his attention—the attention she had believed was fixed on the view before them—onto her in the space of a heartbeat.
‘No—not really,’ she managed on an awkward laugh. ‘Someone just walked over my grave.’
Then, when his dark brows drew together in a frown of confusion and incomprehension, she had to force herself to continue and explain the superstition.
‘When you get a shiver like that it’s said to mean that someone somewhere is walking over the spot where you’re going to be buried. It’s just an old wives’ tale. I think the scientific explanation is that the shiver is a response to the release of stress hormones.’
She was rambling and betraying her nervousness by doing so. She could see it in the darkness of Zarek’s eyes, shadowed in the flickering light of the candles she had set on the table around them. He was back to watching her too closely for comfort and the steady, intent observation he subjected her to made her shift uncomfortably in her seat.
‘And are you?’ he asked at last, lifting his wine glass to his lips again but not swallowing as he studied her over the top of it. ‘Stressed, I mean.’
‘Of course I am!’
This at least she could answer with total honesty, for a moment or two anyway. She still found it almost impossible to believe that he had come back from the dead. That he was here, sitting with her in the warmth of the evening with the sound of his breathing in her ear, the scent of his skin in her nostrils.
‘Why wouldn’t I be stressed? I started this morning as I have done for the past two years, thinking that I was alone—a widow—that my husband was dead. And then suddenly the door opens and there you are—large as life and twice as ugly. And—and…’
‘And?’ Zarek prompted when she stumbled over the words, unable to go on. Setting his glass down on the wooden table top, he leaned towards her, elbows resting on his thighs, chin supported on his hands. ‘And?’
He was too close. Too dangerously close in every way. She could see the way that his chest rose and fell with each breath, the shadow at his jaw line of the growth of that black beard even though he must have shaved only that morning. This close, and looking into his eyes, she could see how they were not totally dark but the deep brown was flecked with gold, like sparks flying up from a fire. And the scent of his body was like some spice in her nostrils, making her blood heat, her heart pound.
‘And now my life is upside down and inside out and I don’t know where I’m going or who I am.’
‘My wife.’
He inserted the words with smooth precision, like sliding the point of a stiletto into her ribs, so smoothly and easily that at first, at the start, she didn’t actually feel any of the pain it was inflicting on her.
‘You are my wife.’
It was so calm, so controlled, so totally sure that that was all that mattered. And the absolute certainty, the note of dark possessiveness, made her skin chill once more, the tiny hairs at the back of her neck lifting in tension as she managed to control another of those shivers this time.
‘Nothing has changed.’
‘Oh, but it has!’
Talking with Zarek now was rather like skating over a deep, murky pond that was just covered with thin ice. She was sliding every which way, unable to quite get her grip on what was really happening, while all the time being aware that under the ice were the coldest, blackest, most dangerous depths, just waiting for the moment that her foot went through the surface and she tumbled in. Then she had the desperate feeling that the waters would close right over her and the icy cold would steal all her breath away and leave her to drown.
‘Things have to have changed. It’s been two years since I saw you—a lot has to have happened in that time. Two years in which I don’t know where you’ve been, who you’ve been with, what has happened to you.’
‘I could say the same for you.’
Was that darker note that threaded his voice the result of the same sort of careful control she was imposing on herself, the fight not to let the discussion tumble over into the anger that had destroyed them the last time? Or was it one of warning, telling her she was treading on treacherous ground?
‘Oh, I’ve just been here, all the time. But you…’
‘All you have to do is ask.’
Could it really be that simple? But life with Zarek had never been simple anyway. So why should it start being so now, with the weight of the complications of his disappearance added to the way things had been before?
Ask. OK, then…
‘You said you had amnesia. You didn’t remember anything?’
‘Not a thing.’
Was she imagining things or had he actually leaned just a little closer? She was drowning in his eyes, her senses seduced by the warm, clean scent of him. But she couldn’t allow herself to be enticed that way. That was how she had fallen into love—her juvenile childish love—with him at the beginning. She had to hold onto her heart until she knew if it was safe to give it ever again.
‘So what was it that started to bring your memory back to you?’
He took just a moment too long before answering her. The space of perhaps two heartbeats instead of one in a way that set her even more on edge. But his answer when it came was calm, and apparently open enough.
‘Believe it or not, it was those damn pirates who helped to break down the walls my mind had built around it. I couldn’t believe that I was having images of an attack, hearing the word pirates in the twenty-first century. And so I started to look things up, track down stories about pirates in the press, on the Internet. At first it was like looking for a needle in a haystack.’
Needing to break the almost mesmeric hold his closeness had on her, Penny forced herself to sit back, reach for her glass.
‘But then one name kept going round and round in my head—the Troy…Careful.’
The last word was a warning as Penny swallowed too quickly, too awkwardly, and almost choked on her wine. She had been hoping for another name—her own name. The name of his wife. But no, the first things that had come back to him were connected with his company.
‘You never could handle retsina,’ Zarek said in mild amusement. ‘In fact I always thought you hated it.’
‘It wasn’t to my taste at first,’ Penny acknowledged. ‘But I have to admit that I’ve grown to like it better.’
‘Another of those things that have changed while I’ve been away.’
‘Well, you wouldn’t expect everything to just come to a halt—stay there, frozen in ice because you weren’t here.’
Pure nerves had pushed the wild words from her tongue. And she knew what was twisting those nerves into painful knots so that she couldn’t think straight.
‘Of course not.’
